One of the key benefits of moving to the cloud is that someone else–your service provider–takes care of the day-to-day management of your technology. You can focus on adding value at a higher level. Scale capacity and increase your company’s productivity by introducing new capabilities such as collaboration applications or desktop-as-a-service.

Unfortunately, not all clouds are created equal. The success of your business relies upon the quality of the services you choose. You might not experience the level of losses Best Buy did when their site went down on Black Friday, but unplanned downtime can still seriously hurt your business.

The technology inside the cloud services you use really does matter. When you buy commodity-class services, you have no guarantee of the performance, reliability, or even availability of your business-critical data and applications.

This is why Intel and Cisco are working together to deliver enterprise-class cloud services you can rely upon. These two leaders offer more than just promises. Both companies have a long history of proven quality and reliability. Services built upon their technology provide fast time-to-market, offer assured performance, and leverage ongoing innovation.

This assurance of quality is extended to your service provider as well. Cisco identifies cloud providers meeting its highest standards with the Cisco Powered logo. These partners must undergo a rigorous third-party audit to verify that they are able to deliver as promised. This means your services are also protected with end-to-end security. And, with the rise of the Intercloud, you’ll benefit from workload portability between clouds and the ability to comply with local data sovereignty regulations.

You trust Intel and Cisco inside your data center. Now you can trust them inside your cloud services. Intel and Cisco. Connect with confidence.

In this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged, Uri Elzur (Intel) and Mike Dvorkin (@dvorkinista) discuss automation in the data center, from application intent to compliance and governance. What is shared infrastructure? Listen in!

Wednesday was another beautiful day in the neighborhood, the Moscone neighborhood. I started my day with a 6:30 a.m. conference call with some nice people in Amsterdam to talk about one of the topics John Chambers put front-and-center in his keynoteaddress: business outcomes.

Hosted by Cisco’s Mala Anand, the Wednesday morning keynote focused on Internet of Everything and included Intel’s Doug Davis, NetApps’ George Kurian, and EMC’s Bill Schmarzo. For me, Schmarzo’s points on business models and big data were particularly interesting. His premise was essentially that at the core, the Internet of Everything and big data are about business transformation. A great quote: “Organizations don’t need a big data strategy, they need a strategy that incorporates big data.” Yes, yes, and yes.

Paras and Associates: Using Video to Remove Language BarriersMelinda Paras was one of the customer speakers at the collaboration press announcements earlier this week. Paras is CEO of Paras and Associates (PAA), which designed and now manages the first operational video/voice over IP call center–the Health Care Interpreter Network (HCIN)–a cooperative of California public hospitals sharing interpreter services. PAA offers technology systems that enable immediate access to language interpreting via video and telephone.

“Clinicians trust that they can reach language interpreters instantly—whether they are across the street, or across the country,” says Paras. “High quality video enables a degree of nuance and rapport that you simply can’t achieve with just a telephone.” Read More »

The Internet of Things (IoT) has already started to transform the world—and it is the next big wave of growth in our industry. At the edge of the network, devices are becoming more intelligent, and gateways are enabling the efficient, secure transmission of data by connecting legacy and new infrastructure to each other and to the cloud. As these “systems of systems” proliferate, the volume of data available for analysis multiplies exponentially. The software-defined datacenter is becoming increasingly important as it provides economies of scale for big data storage and analytics—and the importance of keeping that data secure from device to datacenter is paramount. A holistic approach that integrates hardware, software, and services is crucial for developing IoT in the coming decade.

Collaborators in Innovation

At the center of this transformation is a new ecosystem where industry leaders join forces to enable real-world use cases and deliver greater value to customers. Together, Cisco and Intel are committed to delivering innovation across the IoT spectrum—from devices at the edge to datacenters on the backend, and everything in between. This shared end-to-end vision for IoT closely aligns scalable Intel architecture with Cisco’s portfolio of multi-service edge products, powering the Internet of Things across a wide variety of industries. Read More »

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